U.S. Reps. Joe Kennedy III and Bill Keating recently rewarded Fall River with the wages of despair, delivering $3.6 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Some of that money will help the homeless get in out of the weather and some of it will help people buy a home.

Fall River people who oughta know better say the state and federal governments “ignore” the city. Does $3.6 million sound like ignorance to you?

The wages of despair make a damned good paycheck, just as long as a fair amount of Fall River stays poor.

Of course, you can’t just come to Fall River and say, “Yo, you people look busted out. Here’s some cash.”

That would be crude.

Rep. Kennedy, heir to a great tradition of handing money to Fall River, noted that, “As Fall River’s economy continues to grow, strong community services are more essential than ever.”

The economy is growing?

In Fall River?

If you spend your days and your nights in Fall River and you talk to people who have never been elected to anything, you get the feeling that the local economy is a busted watch.

Thanks for the money, though. We’ll put it right to work ending homelessness and next year, or three years after that, when you come back, there won’t be any homeless left in the city.

Even I can’t write that without laughing, and I don’t like to laugh during the work week.

Fact is, we’ll spend the $3.6 million. The homeless will get some meals out of it, maybe some nights out of the cold weather. This is good. We live in New England and people need to sleep indoors, especially in February.

And if the money goes to help some young couple buy a home, well, why the hell not?

Of course, we’ll still be broke when the grant wagon comes around again.

We always are, and that gets us more grant money for more programs that don’t reduce the poverty rate, not ever.

Never.

The people who make out best on this are the people who “administer” the grant money. No anti-homelessness program in history ever figured out how to get the homeless people a salary and a pension, things very often enjoyed by the people who run poverty programs.

In the last 20 years or so, Fall River’s lost almost all of its sewing shops. The city’s biggest employer, Quaker Fabric, was wiped out by the Chinese some years ago.

When another state or federal welfare payment comes trickling in, there isn’t a politician loose in Fall River who won’t climb up behind the nearest podium and screech, “Look what I got for Fall River!” like handouts were something to be proud of.

Jobs got shipped to China. Most of the people stayed here.

Back to Rep. Kennedy’s statement about economic growth.

In a city experiencing economic growth, the people running the “poverty programs” would instead be running businesses and the people who are poor and homeless now would be working for those businesses.

What’s the likelihood of that happening?

We talk about “what’s the mayor going to do,” and which city councilor hates which other city councilor, and the whole thing is held up, propped up and painted over by money from other people in the state.

I am 57 years old, born in Fall River. I have been writing for The Herald News for 21 years, right in a row.

And once, once before I light a cigar and drive home from my last shift at the paper, I want to see this headline: “Fall River To Feds: Sorry But We Don’t Need The Money.”